Fragile Existence

Fragile existence (2022) is a film by London-based artist Gaby Sahhar, which explores the taxonomy and monitoring of bodies in public space. Shot in three chapters, between London and Paris, the film’s landscape is blurred, capturing only silhouettes and shadows. Police interview rooms are merged with therapeutic spaces, settings in which individual rights are restricted by legal and psychoanalytic frameworks. In other scenes, public facilities are repurposed to explore the mobility of migrants and classed bodies. Centering gender expression in each of these contexts, Sahhar questions which bodies are valued by and made accessible to state care. Inspired by the experiences of their Palestinian family who recently immigrated to the UK, the artist investigates the forms of stability, wealth and gender marketed to those on the margins through a set of experiential visual dialogues.